Thursday, May 10, 2012

Simple as this sounds I found that the process is not as simple and as well documented as it could be, especially with regards to creating the clustered SnapInfo LUN and folders. Consequently I decided to document it with (a first for this blog) screenshots.

I am going to assume that you have already hooked up your hosts to your NetApp system, and that you’ve installed SnapDrive and SnapManager for Hyper-V.

The steps, in a nutshell, are:

Create the Snapinfo LUN

Make the Snapinfo LUN a highly available clustered resource

Configure SnapManager for Hyper-V

Creating the SnapInfo LUN

Create a volume to host your Hyper-V SnapInfo LUN

Open up Snapdrive on of your Hyper-V cluster nodes, go to the Disks node, and click Create Disk. This launches the Create Disk Wizard.

Click Next. Now highlight the volume you created in step 1, enter a LUN name and description:

Click Next. Select whether you want to manually select the igroups (collection of initiators) or whether you want the filer to do it automatically.

Click Next. Choose the option to create a new Cluster Group to host the LUN

Click Next and click Finish to exit the wizard.

To recap, the above will:

Create a LUN on the volume of your choosing

Format the LUN with the NTFS filesystem

Add the disk to your Failover Cluster as part of a Cluster group

Assign a driveletter to the disk.

***SnapInfo LUN Size Provisioning: The NetApp filer will store about 50KB metadata per VM per snapshot. Due to the way Hyper-V snapshots work it will store two snaps per snapshot, therefore if we backup 20 VM’s once per day our sizing will be as follows: 20 * 50KB = 1MB * 2 = 2MB per day. NetApp allows us to store 255 snapshots per volume so we should cater for 510 MB total. I give it 10GB just because I can. And because thin provisioning works.

About Me

About This Blog

This blog serves 2 purposes. Firstly, I want to share information with other IT pros about the technologies we work with and how to solve problems we often face. I work with technologies from the desktop to the data center, Active Directory, System Center, Exchange, Hyper-V, VMware, Networking and Storage.

Less altruistically, I use my blog as a reference. There's so much to learn and remember in our field that it's impossible to keep up. By blogging, I have a notebook that I can access from anywhere. It has made me look much smarter than I probably am on many occasions.